The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Network devices, such as network switches, routers, and the like, often employ policy databases that store policy rules defined for different packet flows. The policy rules are associated with a set of actions to be executed upon packets entering the network devices. The network devices often perform searches/lookups in the policy database to find a policy rule that matches a packet.